By the time the Chinese historical thriller The Tang Mist ended, I have to admit I disliked almost everything about it.
Starting out incredibly well, after just a few episodes, The Tang Mist turned into such a vacuous cesspool of depravity, evil and narcissism, that little good came from any of it.
Starring Feng Shao Feng as the iconic detective Di Ren Jie, and with Li Yu as Duan Shi Si, Shao Yun as Chu Qing Lan, and Nick Shan as Lin Bu Yan, and directed by Xiang Qiu Liang (Anaconda) and Xiang He Sheng (Anaconda), what the interesting-looking C-drama initially promised, at least for me, never transpired.
The performances of the main cast of The Tang Mist are not great
Performance-wise, for instance, Feng Shao Feng’s performance as the iconic Di Ren Jie, a man was initially portrayed interestingly, turns into a truly arrogant, lecture-y and constantly-berating-others caricature of himself.
Meanwhile, Li Yu’s always-shouting-at-high-volume Duan Shi Si is as annoying as hell, and the other bland two might as well not even have been there, as their performances are dull and as mostly useless as their characters turned out to be.
There is also no chemistry between any of the leads none of whom, IMO, seemed like a member of the “superb detective team” that promo blurbs sold us and that didn’t pan out at any point during the entire story.
No goodness or redemption, just evil, evil, evil
The cases themselves are dark, depressing, nasty, which I wouldn’t mind if any of them held a hint of redemption. They don’t.
For me, for C-dramas like this to work, there has to be some goodness comes out of the evil occasionally, and at least a glimmer of hope as the drama ends, or it ends up being just a debauched slash-fest with no substance. Something that, sadly, this one turned out to be.
Like one of the main characters said at the end about all the people in town just going about their business “as if they had no part in the mess” – De Ren Jie lecturing them was pointless as no positivity would come out of it.
Throw in that most of the cases felt undeveloped as, after wandering around aimlessly for a while, they would suddenly be solved.
This being a short drama obviously had something to do with that, although tighter writing could have fixed the issue.
These two things alone are why the long-running smash-hit series Strange Tales of Tang Dynasty, with its humor, well-developed investigations and its cases sometimes working out for the best, does work and this one simply does not.
After all that drama features some awful things being perpetrated on people, but goodness winning out over evil sometimes at least doesn’t make it feel so pointless.
Season 2 of The Tang Mist?
From The Tang Mist deliberately being titled ‘Season 1’, I am presuming we will be getting a Season 2 at some point.
I doubt I will be watching it.
Not unless the plot is markedly different, the character and plot development is much stronger, and the outcomes of some cases at least hold out a little hope, as I’m not interested in more of something this dark with no conceivable goodness or redemption to it.
Not if it’s the same self-indulgent, emotionally empty, and ultimately bland and, frankly, quite draggy mess.
Eventually, after thinking long and hard, and against my better judgement, I gave The Tang Mist a 7 out of 10 as the cinematography and set design are gorgeous, the opening animation is beautifully and obviously lovingly-created, and I adored that banger of an ending theme (even if it is, apparently, AI-generated? Disappointing as well, if true.)
Without all of those things, I would have struggled to give it above a 5.
If you want to give it a go and, of course, you may like it much more than I did, you can watch The Tang Mist via WeTV now.
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